Evaluating teacher performance focus of education forum in Worcester

Thursday

Jan 31, 2013 at 6:00 AM

By Jacqueline Reis TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF

State Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education Mitchell D. Chester has found a lot to like about Worcester’s schools, but he said more aggressive action on teacher performance is needed statewide.

“We pay for years on the job, and we pay for accumulation of advanced credits,” Mr. Chester said. “We now have a really strong sense … that those two pieces have limited nexus to productivity.

“Let’s start to build an approach that deals with effectiveness,” he continued. And, he said, “Let’s start to be more deliberate with our assignment provisions in our contracts.”

Mr. Chester’s comments came at a forum titled “Worcester Public Schools: Successes and Challenges” that The Research Bureau held at MCPHS University (formerly the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences). He spoke as a part of a lineup that also included Worcester Superintendent Melinda J. Boone and Morton Orlov II, president of the Mass Math & Science Initiative, which has spread Advanced Placement success to a wider and more diverse group of Worcester high school students and teachers. Richard Burke, president of senior care services at Fallon Community Health Plan, moderated.

Eventually, the state will require districts to incorporate student performance into teacher evaluations, a move that was part of the state’s successful application for federal Race to the Top dollars. Local teachers union president Leonard A. Zalauskas of the Educational Association of Worcester and Ms. Boone said they are awaiting more details from the state on that.

An audience member echoed the teacher assignment issue that Mr. Chester raised. She said that many years ago, a Worcester school that had a bilingual program was forced to hire to non-Spanish-speaking teachers who through seniority bumped out Spanish-speaking teachers.

“That does remain a challenge,” Ms. Boone said. In the most recent teachers’ contract, the district inserted the requirement that teachers be interviewed by principals at the school they are applying to, but that interview is only one of several factors considered.

The district has eight innovation schools, and many have more autonomy over hiring than do other district schools. Ms. Boone said she’ll look to those schools’ experiences to see what effect that autonomy is having there. The teachers union contract expires this year, and the administration is in the process of drawing up its proposals for negotiations, she said.

Mr. Zalauskas said in an interview that long-serving teachers “very rarely” have performance issues. “You have to be a talented teacher already to last in Worcester,” he said.

But Ms. Boone argued that even strong teachers might fit better at one school than another. The culture and expectations vary.

Emphasizing student performance and de-emphasizing longevity and education has its limits. Teachers tend to show improvement over their first five years of teaching, but the connection of longevity to improvement drops off after that, Mr. Chester said. Advanced degrees beyond the required master’s seem to help math and science teachers but do not make a reliable difference in other subjects, he said.

Very strong and very weak teachers tend to stand out, he said, but those in the middle are hard to distinguish. And only 20 percent of the state’s teachers work in subjects that are tested on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System tests.

Nonetheless, Mr. Chester said he is “very interested” in new compensation systems and noted that there is a “profound” impact on students who have consecutive years of strong or weak teachers. Some teachers consistently pack two years of learning into a single year of classes, while others consistently move their students less than a year ahead, he said.

Mr. Chester started his presentation Wednesday by noting Worcester’s progress. The district does not have as many students now (24,770) as it did 10 years ago (25,730), but enrollment has been growing over the last five years. The growth has created a student body with higher percentages of low-income and limited English proficient students, but the district has still seen “tremendous productivity,” Mr. Chester said. While the success has varied by school, “it’s substantial, really substantial,” he said.

He pointed out that the portion of 10th-graders who score proficient or above on the MCAS test has rise 24 percentage points over five years, while the percent of those scoring at that level in math has risen 14 points. In addition, the dropout rate has gone down, and the graduation rate has gone up over the past six years.